• 10 Dec, 2025 *

My school that I have been at for over a year now functions a lot differently to the system I was used to beforehand.

At my old schools there were 2 levels of mandatory education, primary and secondary, primary being everything upto year 6 and secondary being 7-12/13. To graduate year 12 with a certificate of education for whatever state you were in you needed to meet the requirements for that certificate - usually a point system. At my old school we started working towards that in year 9.

However my new school uses a very different system, it is much more akin to the elementary, middle, high system the US uses. We have junior, middle and senior, being R-5, 6-9 and 10-12/13 respectively. And just like how you worked towards a certificate of education other multiple years at my old school we do the same thing here, but we start in year 10 and only really get it going in the independent way that is it publicised as in year 11.

On first experience this was frustrating, a meaningless limitation put in place that ends up restricting my learning.

Then I started doing what Ive done the past year with standard subjects at this school for it. I looked ahead and got an understanding of the material I will be learning so that when I get to it in school it is mostly revision and I don’t struggle with it.

And when I saw that, and I took on the independency I would normally do even if this isnt a memorisation or skill based thing, what I was looking ahead at was morso the planning of what I do with the independent learning which starts with looking for an end goal. I looked at this like a creative project, and all I saw then were creative limitations.

So, it now feels less like they are inhibiting my self teaching and more like they are forcing me to refine exactly what I will do. This is like spending time planning out a piece of art before jumping into it, drawing the perspective plane in a landscape, or looking at the rule of three in a photography composition.

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Now comes the point where I write down all of my thinking and what my looking ahead and preplanning for the planning phase is.

I start off with what do I want to do as a career? Or rather what intersts me at the current point in time that could become a career?

• Urban design
• Engineering
• Photography
• Media
• Psychology

Excellent. Now I see systems and creative communication.

I had done a similar thing to this a few months ago, just in a much more spur of the moment way, in my post Learning what I want to learn about. Back then I landed on a general directional phrase of:

Humans and their effects on and from the systems they inhabit.

Yeah wow look at how much my interests can change in just a few months.

A big part of year 10 here is planning your pathway from where you are to a career, these are not concrete more like guiderails.

So; a pathway into something like this?

Well because my interests are so interdiciplinary and different, I say just keep every door open while focusing on something. So make sure I do subjects like psychology, advanced math and arts.

But doing litterarly anything except a standard curiculum subjects only is highly advised in my school. In Australia there is a program called VET, Vocational Education and Training. So what in this program can I do?

Uhh...

Well.

• Cert III in screen and media - actually this is mostly vfx and the digital editing side of media...
• Cert III in design fundamentals? actually this is based on game development, ive done that before... and uhh not an industry I want my career to be in.
• Cert IV in photography. Yeah great actually, I even remember seeing a school in the city that customised it to offer to high school students - of shit it costs 9 grand. nevermind then.

Yeah there are a lot of problems with this, and also its really hard to find what actually exists because its offered by acreddeted third party providers and the central collation of it all is pretty shit.

So yeah thats where I am leaving this.

Maybe I can treat the lack of applicable VET certificates or deliberate training as a creative limitation in my own learning.